...
It's a heavily pressed time, as usual, for me. Mostly I'm trying to figure out exactly how it is that I could make $10.00 per hour at the Library and get roughly an entire paycheck refunded at tax season, and now make just about $7.50 per hour as a puppeteer and owe $100.00 in taxes. Surely there's a catch in this somewhere...
...All that I find lacking is even what scanty stability the Library afforded me; but beyond this, by far the most provocative element at hand right now are the books--the magnificent and determined little volumes that catch me up in tidal waves of meaning and rigorous discovery. Lately, Wallace Shawn's "The Fever," Steinbeck's "In Dubious Battle," Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae," Simone Weil's and Rachel Bespaloff's essays on the Iliad, and, of course, the Iliad itself, have all been digging deep into the soil of me, mingling with my roots, gnawing at them. They represent something of a departure from what would usually be a well-balanced and much more even-handed reading list. Normally, I travel from book to book the way Canadian Geese migrate, constantly responding to the exigencies of the previous situation by seeking out the next venue as a kind of antidote. This is a tactic I've long relied upon to stave off the worst excesses of apathetic despair, or frustration, any of which would usually ensue if I spent too much of myself in any given place--a fact which has much to do with my generall wanderlustful temperament.
In this case, however, these works happened to all rise to the top of my reading list more or less simultaneously--and instead of threatening to subsume my tenuous sense of self-assurance (such as it is), these works of succeeded in stirring that same piece of me which still slowly--glacially slowly--cultivates my long-running Work Song Project; that is, the piece of me which now does nothing but wrestle with Jacob's Angel, in the impossible and irresolvable places of our beautifully fucked-up world.
(I often wonder exactly how it is that our Elders manage to live with the cumulative weight of so much memory, with the terrible responsibility of so much remembering. Is it even conceivable that something so rending as Alzheimer's could even begin to be a veiled blessing?)
Shawn's "Fever" is the monologue of a privileged artist traveling through an oppressed city. Steinbeck's "In Dubious Battle" traces a migrant-workers' strike led by doomed communists. Paglia's "Sexual Personae" follows the development of feminist imagery and sexuality through the roots of Western culture. Weil's and Bespaloff's essays were both written at the very beginning of the 2nd World War, recasting the Iliad against our modern propensity for slaughter.
I haven't been routed by the collective strength of these, yet. They obviously rest beneath my surface as I work and play with and teach my kids. But I write this here, and for you, because I know these themes hit home for you, too; once stirred, none of this ever really lies dormant for long...
...is there a chronically unfulfillable element here, endemic to the nature of these oppressive themes? I'm humming worksongs again as I walk down the street, mulling over these bleeding books...
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